December 16, 2008

Note: the opinions expressed in the list below are not necessarily those of the author, but rather those of a selection of the author's clients.

Regarding the items on the Quick Launch bar navigation on most sites:

The People and Groups link is confusing and needs to be deleted.

The headings don't fit my organization. (e.g. We call our locations "sites," so the heading for sub-sites can't be called "Sites.")

The headings are confusing. I don't understand the difference between Documents and Lists. I really don't care what the difference is. And why is there a Discussions heading if there is no content under it?

I can't find what I need. (Translation: The Quick Launch bar and its contents are invisible.)

As I envision the 2009 release of SharePoint, I'm wondering how these common complaints will be addressed. In MOSS 2007 it is easy to change the navigation headings on a site-by-site basis (not so for WSS), more complicated and risky to change them globally (i.e., your edits to the onet.xml file that governs these headings could be overwritten by an upgrade or patch). Are headings needed at all? Should MS do away with the Documents / Lists / Pictures / Discussions model and let the site owner structure the quick launch bar as content is created? Or define the headings at the outset, the way the Site Map's categories can be defined and then accessed every time a site is created?

Or, given #4, is the quick launch bar a flawed concept? I have witnessed end-users look for content on a site and never glance at that section of the window, and I have heard the same story from my content-owner clients - "I told him exactly where the link was but he still came back and said he couldn't find it." I've worked with SharePoint long enough that I strongly support the local content / global content model, but many clients seem to want static content (e.g., a "hot list") in the left nav as well as across the top of the page.

The Quick Launch Bar and its headings - useful or not? What do you think?

December 09, 2008

I have been deferring this blog post about the Fatwire "debacle" or "uber-gaffe" at the Gilbane Boston 2008 conference last week, because I have been wanting to do more than simply post an eyewitness account and debate what ratio of North American Puritanism to Political Incorrectness was at work in the room.

There has been media coverage, blogging, and tweeting about the incident, so I won't recap. The morning after the conference ended, I attended a Boston KM Forum meeting where Lynda Moulton, a Gilbane analyst and organizer of the Enterprise Search Track, said that it was the single most talked-about event of the conference.

The conclusion seems nearly universal: that Yogesh Gupta, president and CEO of FatWire, made a big mistake, that he didn't know his audience, and didn't react accordingly when the room started to turn against him (by proceeding with the demo rather than switching gears). Why do a demo with a site that could be perceived as offensive, when what you're demonstrating could be shown on any kind of site?

Gupta's own presentation underscored that engagement with customers is no longer about Web Content Management, it's about Web Experience Management. (The keynote's summary in the conference program could serve as an oddly prescient bit of advice from Gupta to himself as he moves forward with the bad press: "In today's connected, competitive, and web 2.0-enabled business environment, word of mouth and user reviews often have greater influence over purchasing decisions than traditional marketing messages. Thus, building engaged relationships with customers, partners, prospects, and other audiences… is essential to success.")

FatWire knows the engagement business. This is the company which, at last year's Gilbane, pulled off the most engaging vendor-floor gimmick I have seen – they handed out big green buttons with their logo and a four-digit number. If you could find someone else, either in the vendor area or anywhere at the conference, whose number matched yours, you both would win a prize. (I can't remember what the prize was but it was good enough to get me, and many others, to approach strangers in the name of a common goal.) The game worked best if you wore your button prominently, displaying the FatWire branding for all to see, so it was a win for FatWire as well as a win for the participants who made connections even if they didn't win a prize. A gimmick so effective that I remember it a year later, long after the batteries died in the other swag I received that day.

I would have liked to see Gupta do more to engage the audience at this year's conference, especially when things went south. When the cry of "That's offensive!" went up, I was praying that Gupta and his technical co-presenter would suavely agree, and then show how FatWire's interactive technologies could change the experience for the end-user of the site. (For example, by reading an end-user's profile, local time of day, and the IP address of his computer, the site could detect whether the user was at home (where children in the house might be awake) or at work, and sanitize the site appropriately - making it look as innocuous as the now-defunct workfriendly.net used to do, or turning "unsafe" images to static a la Flickr's SafeSearch.) I think Gupta should do something like this at future demos - purposefully start off with a controversial page, perhaps referencing last week's incident ("When I showed this at the Gilbane Conference in 2008, people were offended. What do you think?"), let the audience take offense if they will, and then manage their experience so skillfully that they are impressed by the technology rather than by his questionable choice of demo material.

I know hindsight is 20-20, and it's tough to think on your feet, but he might have been able to turn last week's situation to his advantage, perhaps by asking for a show of hands ("Who else finds it offensive?") and drawing the crowd into a discussion ("North American Puritanism vs. Political Incorrectness, anyone?"). He had already lost their focus on his traditional-marketing demo; it would have been better to scrap that portion of the presentation and confront the issue directly, rather than treating it as an interruption to be moved past. As the old (offensive) joke punchline goes, "Your weekend's shot, you might as well mow the lawn!"

December 03, 2008

Michael Edson, the Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian Institution, gave a beautiful, witty, and inspiring presentation on the challenges of trying to bring the Institution into the digital-media age.

His premise: The Smithsonian, and institutions like it, will continue to be relevant only if they return to their roots:

Democratize knowledge & innovation

Create a free and open commons

Act with urgency

His vision is to create a Smithsonian Commons, much like the Flickr Commons or the MIT Open Courseware site, where valuable resources are made available for the benefit of everyone.

The organizational/cultural challenges he is facing were made clear when he gave some statistics about the Smithsonian Institution's makeup:

How many employees? – 6,000

How many volunteers? – 6,000

How many top-level decision-makers? – 12,000

Decisions are consensus-based. There is no department responsible for KM – they use the "thousand wildflowers blooming in the wilderness" model. The result is that SI's website has issues with findability, usability, inconsistent branding, and under-utilization of web 2.0 technologies. These problems result in what Edson called the "vexational phenomena" of the Smithsonian's current situation:

His example: If you're interested in learning about SpaceShipOne, the Smithsonian has the actual ship. On the SI website, you can learn about it on a page with photos (but no hyperlinks!). Wikipedia, YouTube, and Flickr all provide better, more dynamic content. "If you want to learn about the world, where are you likely to go?"

This statement struck home – as a parent, I have often turned to the web as an aid for teaching my children about science and nature, and it never occurred to me to go to the Smithsonian's site – YouTube and Flickr are usually the first places I go for exciting visuals to support the concepts I'm trying to get across. And I can't remember ever coming across the Smithsonian in search results, or clicking through to any of its pages.

It's sobering to think that this venerable institution, with its mind-bogglingly extensive collections, hasn't been able to get out of its own way quickly enough to have a strong web presence today. Edson's presentation really made me wish that it would, and I hope he can lead the organization through a series of speedy improvements in order to regain the brand recognition and trustworthiness that the Smithsonian once had.

(An audience member pointed out – "we're not just searching for lobster restaurants, we're searching for how to increase the lobster population." Raghavan's response was that this is a different class of web search – the informational query as opposed to the task-based query. The informational query still relies on documents to aid research.)

Raghavan continued: We used to think of the web as a web of pages, but really we want to move to a web of objects – people, places, businesses, which have relationships to each other. Objects have attributes which can be missing, noisy, etc. which complicates the delivery of relevant results. But the upshot is:

Intents are satisfied by juxtaposing objects and attributes.

Attributes are assigned to objects by the following methods:

Machine learning techniques (classification / extraction) which requires a human intermediary to facilitate the learning process. This method is scalable, but not reliable. (example – the search engine needs to know that "bush" and "rice" could refer to people in the category Politics, within a specific timeframe in history).

Building out an open ecosystem. This is less scalable but more reliable. With this method, publishers have incentives to provide deep structure. It demands an opening up of search as an ecosystem between the search engine, the publishers, and developers.

Method #2 is Raghavan's preferred method for turning a page of blue text hyperlinks into the richer results (images + ratings + links) we are starting to see.

Raghavan used Yelp as an example – "for this restaurant, here are the ratings, here's the address, here is the map." If Yelp as a publisher provides this rich structure to Yahoo, the search results will be richer – not just a blue link on the page, but a graphical cluster of information:

Raghavan was careful to point out that these richer search results do not promote Yelp in the rankings. But it does make users happy and makes them more likely to go to Yelp, and more likely to keep coming back.

His conclusion: "If you can incentivize people to do the right thing, they'll do the right thing for you." The "right thing" in this case is to provide rich, trustworthy open-source information to the search engine and to developers, to improve the end-user experience for the next generation of web search.